In an effort to try and assist my raid team in any way that I possibly can, I went ahead and flow charted all of the shit going on in phase two of this encounter. Understanding that some people are more visual learners, I thought that it might help to see it walked through in such a fashion. I hope it helps!

(You may need to click for a full size image, if this one is too tiny to read!)

On personal responsibility: It’s funny how after a while you end up putting the same people in the “responsibility” roles time and time again, because they’re reliable. They’ll always position the boss in the exact same position and orientation. They’ll kite the laser fire mechanic in the same way every time. They will never, ever, ever miss an interrupt. They will always prioritize the correct targets. And you manage to get the fight down to where you have a nearly 100% kill rate, because the people who aren’t reliable don’t need to be reliable, they just need to put up good numbers most of the time.

And then you get to That Goddamn Fight where the “don’t fuck up or we wipe” role is selected randomly. And pretty much every tier has at least one of these fights. And you find out that having 23 of 25 people that can handle a mechanic can’t make up the That One Guy Who Just Doesn’t Get It. And every time you pull the boss, you pray that he doesn’t get targeted because if he does you might as well just go stand in the fire right away to hasten the wipe.

Honestly, that’s what caused my guild to fold up 25man and break into 10 mans: Ascendant Council and Al’Akir (on normal!) were just too unforgiving when on any given night we had 3-5 people who just couldn’t process both their passive responsibilities (dps or healing) and active responsibilities (get out of the raid before you fry us) at the same time. And without aggressively recruiting people and cutting half-baked raiders at the drop of a hat, we were just destined to grind the same fights that Everybody Already Knows Except That Guy until we got lucky and he didn’t get targeted by the gimmick.

Actually that’s not completely fair. These mechanics aren’t consistently of the same difficulty. Every frost orb that spawns is of varying difficulty, depending on where the flame patch spawns, the timing of debuffs, tornado/well location, etc. It’s RNG as to how difficult the job is when it’s person X’s turn – you should still be able to overcome any problem, but the problems are definitely not consistent.

Sinestra orbs on the other hand, highlight That Guy syndrome. But the kiting requirement is about the same each time. Council is a different beast and imo, the hardest and most annoying fight in the tier.

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